Maybe a Low-Salt Diet Isn’t So Healthy?

We’ve been urged to lower the salt in our diet to avoid coronary heart disease, amongst other ills. In the short term such restrictions will lower blood pressure, especially if it’s raised, but there is not much data on long-term benefits. This has been addressed in a study reported in the online Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, examined the rates of mortality and cardiovascular disease in participants from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANESIII). They were recruited at or below age 30, and followed for up to 12 years. At enrollment, they completed a food questionnaire based on what they had eaten in the previous 24 hours.

The dietary sodium and calorie intake was calculated based on this single dietary recall answer for the 8,700 enrollees. After adjusting for known cardiovascular risk factors (smoking, diabetes, raised blood pressure), the 25% of participants who consumed the lowest amount of sodium had an 80% increased likelihood of death from a cardiovascular cause than the 25% consuming the highest amount of salt. The risk of death from any cause was about 24% greater for those consuming lower salt.

The researchers say that the findings suggest that “for the general adult population, higher sodium is very unlikely to be independently associated with higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease or all other causes of death”. For someone like me, who has felt guilty about sprinkling a little salt on my food, this finding makes me very happy! So, low salt diet or high salt diet? I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between these two – not too little, not too much, but just right . . .